An Empirical Study Of Perceptual Priming In Reading Comprehension Teaching At Junior High School

This research aims to find the problems of reading comprehension teaching at junior high school,and improve the reading comprehension teaching via cognitive approach.In this thesis,the author does an empirical study of perceptual priming in reading comprehension teaching at junior high school.The students involved are Grade Nine students at Gezhi Junior High school in Shanghai.The author chooses Class Five as the experiment class,while Class Three as the control class.The experiment class is given the perceptual priming before doing reading comprehension while the control class is asked to do the same exercises without being primed.The tools of the survey are three experiments and a questionnaire.Guided by the theory of cognitive priming,the teaching process focuses on how to stimulate students' brain power,shorten their reaction time and understand the reading materials better.The experiment lasts 8 weeks and three experiments are conducted by the author.The data of the experiments are collected and analyzed.Before the experiments,students are asked to do the questionnaire about the current English reading comprehension teaching condition.The questionnaire shows that reading interest plays an important role in reading comprehension.There also exist some problems in reading comprehension teaching.Some teachers still use the traditional grammar-translation method when teaching reading comprehension.They focus too much on the meaning of each sentence and make the reading class inflexible and inefficient.The findings of the experiment shows that this kind of perceptual priming is effective in helping students process reading materials and improving their reading speed.